


Sometimes a family is you, the werewolves that saved your life, and the pack alpha that may or may not want to kill you

by PostcardsfromTheoryland



Series: Bad Things Happen Bingo [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Found Family, Gen, Vampire Keith (Voltron), Vampires, Werewolf Allura, Werewolf Hunk (Voltron), Werewolf Lance (Voltron), Werewolf Pidge | Katie Holt, Werewolf Shiro (Voltron), Werewolves, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2021-01-15 06:25:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21248897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PostcardsfromTheoryland/pseuds/PostcardsfromTheoryland
Summary: In Lance's defense, werewolves can andwillpack-bond with just about anything. And that includes lonely, blood-sucking vampires.





	Sometimes a family is you, the werewolves that saved your life, and the pack alpha that may or may not want to kill you

**Author's Note:**

> Bad Things Happen Bingo prompt: Broken Angel
> 
> Many thanks to [OrpheusSong](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OrpheusSong/pseuds/OrpheusSong/) for the beta!

“Hey man, let me go!” God damn it, he’d been picked up by fucking hunters. He’d been lax; hunters usually tried for right after the full moon, when they knew wolves would be groggy and weak from the transformation back to human. Why here? Why now? Why him?

The hunters didn’t respond as they shoved Lance into a small brick room, no windows of-fucking-course, and slammed the door behind him. It was a heavy door, probably steel, and Lance pounded on it for a while before recognizing that he wasn’t alone in the room. There was someone else, maybe around Lance’s age, huddled in the corner as far away from Lance as he could get.

And, if Lance’s sense of smell wasn’t failing him, he was a vampire. Shit.

“Hey man, what’s going on here?” The vampire just whimpered at him and curled further in on himself. “Seriously, what is happening?”

“Please stay away, you can’t, I’m not…. I’m not human.” Wait. Vampy boy couldn’t smell that Lance wasn’t human, either? Hm, Lance could play this two different ways. Did he reveal what he was to Fangs over there and see if they could break out of here together? Or did he play dumb and act like he had no idea what was going on?

It wasn’t much of a contest.

“Yeah, sure, you’re not human. I totally get it, because I’m a mermaid!”

“Shut up, I mean it!” There was a weird lisp as he spoke, and now that Lance was looking harder, the vampire didn’t seem...well. Maybe it had something to do with the relatively new-looking burn on his face? It didn’t smell infected from here, but admittedly Lance didn’t really know how vampire injuries worked.

“Ok, let’s say I believe you. What kind of non-human are you supposed to be?”

“I’m a vampire and please don’t!” he cried as Lance got closer. There was definitely something wrong with him.

“Right. Sure. You’re a vampire, Edward. Do you sparkle in the sunlight, too?” Edward (for lack of a better name) growled at him and may have grumbled under his breath about Mormons.

“I mean it.”

“If you’re a vampire then why aren’t I dead yet?”

“You’re going to be fine. I… can’t. Those hunters just brought you here to torture me, so they’ll probably let you go after I die.” And wow that was morbid, even for a coffin-loving emo-looking vampire like this one.

“Can’t? Can’t what, can’t bite me? What, you got like vampire erectile dysfunction or something?” Edward snarled at him for that, but Lance’s heart dropped when the problem became apparent. He was missing his _fangs_. The hunters must have removed them, which meant the vampire’s main weapon and only real way to get food was gone. Which explained the weird lisp and why Edward seemed so unwell - he was starving. Lance never thought he’d feel sorry for a vampire, but man, that was just cruel.

“Ok, so I’m not saying I believe you’re a vampire, but clearly those goons who brought me here do. So, you want to give me the story?”

“What’s there to tell,” he asked miserably, shifting into an even smaller ball on the floor.

“Well, your name, first off. Unless you want me to keep calling you Edward.”

“....Keith.”

“Huh. I was expecting something more… Victorian.”

"I wasn't turned in the 1880s."

"So, the 1980s? I mean going by the mullet?"

"It's not a mullet…" he complained, tugging at his hair as if that would make it less '80s. "I was turned in 2012."

Huh. So a pretty young vampire, then. The wolf in him, this close to the full moon, was already shouting eagerly about taking the vampire in and making him pack and _no, wolf, we don’t have packs with vampires, and besides, he must have his own coven, and Allura would fucking KILL us for bringing home a vampire_.

“Keith. Okay, I can work with that. I’m Lance, by the way.” He realized a second too late that he’d given his real name, but oh well.

“Great. Just, please, stay over there.” And Lance got it, he really did. Keith was starving and had no way of actually attacking him. He was probably too far gone into hunger to register Lance’s scent as anything other than “not vampire”. The good news, though, was that it seemed the hunters that had taken them didn’t realize Lance wasn’t human, either. There weren’t any silver restraints for Lance or a way to contain his transformation. They probably had no idea what Lance was. Hell, they might not even know that werewolves existed. His wolf snarled in anticipation under the surface. _Good_.

* * *

Lance had always assumed that sharing a cell with a vampire would be real awkward, but maybe because Keith thought he was human, or maybe because Lance was just that good at making small-talk, things weren’t too weird. Sure, he was still stuck in a small room with a starving vampire but, all things considered, Lance had been in more annoying predicaments.

“I’m not playing 20 questions with you,” Keith mumbled with significantly less vehemence than Lance had been expecting.

“Oh come on, what else are you going to do. Count the bricks?”

“Contemplate whether this is truly death or if I died when I got turned and this will just be the end of my bleak existence.”

“Yeah, ok, Edgelord. Question one: is it an animal?”

“....yes.”

* * *

“If you tell me your favorite band is fucking My Chemical Romance-”

“Hey, MCR is classic. Just because they got lumped in with scene culture doesn’t change how poetic their lyrics were or how innovative their sound was.”

* * *

“Did you think the world was going to end in 2012 with that Aztec calendar thing?”

“You’re going to think this is ironic, but I actually got turned on the day it was supposed to end.”

“No way dude, you’re totally making that up.”

“True story, I swear.”

* * *

“Still not saying I believe you, but you’ve got other teeth. Couldn’t you still bite someone like this?”

“I could, but it wouldn’t do much good. I’m too weak to get enough jaw pressure to actually break the skin, and even if I could, I wouldn’t get down far enough. I’d get maybe 5 drops of blood out of it and just end up...prolonging everything.”

“So if I take a nap you’re not going to ravage me in my sleep?” Keith muttered something under his breath in response that probably wasn't flattering, but waved a hand in his general direction that Lance chose to interpret as "oh no please be my guest and go ahead." He’d almost been expecting to wake up to Keith futilely biting his neck but no, it seemed nothing had changed. Vampy Boy was still huddled in his little corner, staring at the door as if he could actually do something when the hunters came in. Lance wondered when the last time Keith had actually slept was.

* * *

“Truth or dare.”

“Isn’t any dare we could think of doing in a small, windowless room going to be sort of lame, Lance?”

“Truth or truth.” Keith scoffed at him, and Lance took pleasure in finally, finally making Keith laugh. Sort of. He’d take it. “Ok, ok, wait - two truths and a lie. You go first.”

“Hm, ok.” Keith seemed like he was more lethargic than he’d been yesterday and Lance felt a little prickle of worry. He knew there wasn’t anything he could do until the full moon hit, but still. Best to keep Keith preoccupied and engaged. “I’m originally from Texas, I once stole a motorcycle, and I used to have a pet lizard named Elizardbeth.”

“You’re fucking with me.”

“Figure out which one’s the lie, Lance, this was your idea.”

“Alright. So, I love the irony of a Texan vampire, like 'yeehaw I'm here to suck your blood'," Lance privately cheered at the tiny laugh he got for that one. "I'd honestly be surprised if you hadn't stolen a motorcycle, and I could definitely see you with a pet lizard, but no way would you name it a pun. That’s the lie. I'm calling shenanigans on 'Elizardbeth'.”

“Nope,” Keith said with a smile. “Elizardbeth was my pride and joy when I was 14. I stole a car, not a motorcycle.”

“That’s cheating! That’s too close to the motorcycle!”

“Everything’s fair in love and two truths and a lie.”

* * *

“So um, not to be super morbid or anything, but how long do you have, before….”

“Probably a few days.” Good. The full moon was tonight, so as long as Keith’s estimate wasn’t off they’d be golden.

* * *

There were no windows in their cell but Lance could feel the oncoming full moon, the energy thrumming just beneath his skin. He’d change in about a minute so he just had to time this correctly. Lance got up and stretched, though it did very little for the achy muscles. That’s what he got for sleeping on the concrete floor.

“Well, Keith. This has been fun, but it’s time we got out of here, don’t you think?”

“..what?”

Lance winked at him before getting up to pound on the door. “Hey, can I get some water? If you want me to keep torturing your vampire I need to stay hydrated!”

“_Lance what the fuck are you doing?_” Keith hissed from his corner.

“Come on, big scary hunter guys, I just want some water!” And then, yes, footsteps down the hall. Lance really didn’t care one way or the other if they’d actually brought him some water - he just needed them to open the door.

And open the door they did. Lance had half a second to praise himself on his timing before he felt the transformation take hold, skin prickling as the fur came in, bones grinding as his joints shifted. And then, Lance and his wolf were on them; the hunters hadn’t even brought any weapons with them, so overconfident in their abilities to subdue a starving vampire and what they thought had been a powerless human.

Idiots.

_Their necks_, he reminded his wolf over the screaming as they tore off one of the hunter’s arms, _so we can give Keithy-boy easy access to the jugular_. His wolf growled in his ear, mostly wanting to rip and shred anything that had dared to hurt one of their pack, and Lance wasn’t in control enough to remind the wolf that _vampires aren’t pack!_ They didn’t stop until both of the hunters were very dead and looked up, self-satisfied, to see Keith staring at them from across the room, his eyes blown wide and mouth open. He might have been drooling a little.

“You’re a werewolf.”

Lance rolled his eyes as best as he could in this shape before pointedly swinging his muzzle toward the corpses on the floor. Keith didn’t need a second invitation, lunging at the bodies and immediately attaching himself to the rend in the bigger one's neck. Lance was torn between trying to ignore the disgusting sounds of a vampire draining a body and his wolf preening at having provided for a pack member.

He’d deal with that second thought later.

It took Keith barely ten minutes, Lance hovering protectively by the door as he drank, to drain both of them. Keith looked completely gruesome, blood dribbling down past his neck, hands covered in the stuff, fuck, it was dripping off of his hair, but there was something sort of...cute about it? About the way his eyes were slipping closed in contentment and how he kept trying (and failing) to lick the remaining blood off his chin, about how he sat back against the wall with a sigh and smiled just big enough for Lance to see the missing spaces where his fangs should be.

“Thank you.” Lance allowed Keith to pet at his ears for a few minutes, letting them both just breathe, before nudging him in the side. There might still be hunters in other parts of the building and even if there weren’t, there were probably more on the way. Time to go.

Except Keith just kind of mumbled a bit and oh, shit. This was like the vampiric equivalent of a food coma, wasn’t it. Keith had gone for who-knows-how-long without any blood, and now he’d gorged himself on two entire humans, and his body was desperate to put him to sleep so it could process the nutrients or whatever it was that vampires got from blood. Ordinarily Lance would just leave a vampire behind in this situation, but he’d obviously gotten sort of attached to this one, and in any case, Keith was the only one with opposable thumbs at the moment. Lance growled a little and took one of Keith’s hands gently in his mouth, trying to convey the fact that they needed to _get out_. Luckily Keith roused a tiny bit at that, blinking up at him in confusion.

“Oh. Right. Guess we should…” Keith stumbled unsteadily to his feet, Lance attempting to brace his side. Except Keith didn’t head toward the door like he’d been expecting, and ended up inspecting the brick wall, instead. That thing about vampires needing to count everything wasn’t actually true, was it? Was he literally counting the bricks right now? Lance whined in annoyance, earning him a cranky “Yeah, I know, I got it” as Keith continued tracing his fingers along the brick. And then without warning, Keith just...kicked the wall. Just straight up roundhoused it. Then all it took was a slight tap on one of the bricks to bring half the wall down, giving them an opening large enough to squeeze through, Keith smirking blearily over his shoulder at Lance.

Right. Vampiric superstrength. Overdramatic and sort of excessive in this case since they could have, you know, just used the _door_, but helpful.

Lance shoved him outside, clambering through the hole behind him and stretching, grateful to be outside in the moonlight. Unfortunately, that seemed to be it for Keith’s wakefulness - he curled up into a little blood-soaked ball in the grass.

He could leave him here. Lance’s way home was clear, and he’d never been the target for these hunters anyway. Keith’s coven would probably show up to help him out soon, wouldn’t they? He’d be fine.

Except what if he wasn’t?

_Pack_, his wolf insisted. _Home. Safe._

Ugh, fine.

Lance had to lick Keith in the face this time to rouse him, and it took several failed charades for Keith to get what he was after.

“Really? You want to play horsey?” Lance growled in response. No, he didn't want to play horsey, you asshole, but he also wasn't going to leave a defenseless vampire to sleep out in the open. If there were other hunters in the building and they hadn’t heard their buddies screaming as Lance tore their throats out, they must have heard the slam of a vampire breaking down the brick wall. “Okay, okay, fine. And, uh, thanks.” It was the most uncoordinated thing he’d ever seen anyone - human, werewolf, or vampire - do, but eventually Keith managed to get himself slumped over Lance’s back, and in less than a minute Lance had a vampire snoring into the scruff of his neck. Lance kept to the shadows as he made his way back home, gait as smooth as possible so as not to jostle his passenger (though he was fairly certain he could have invited the pack over for a howling and Keith wouldn’t so much as stir, poor thing).

He was relieved when he made it back to their house without any incidents, silently thanking Allura and Shiro for insisting that the pack house backed up to the woods. This trip would have been a lot more difficult if their neighbors were closer than a mile away. It was a balancing act to reach up on his hind legs and turn the doorknob without dislodging Keith, but he managed it in the end and was immediately assaulted by the scent of Hunk, panicking. He’d sort of expected Hunk would be here, waiting for Lance to come home. He was the worrywart of their pack, after all. Hunk’s expression, upon seeing Lance slink his way home with a blood-covered vampire draped on his back, was nothing short of hilarious, an interesting mixture of confusion, annoyance, terror, and amusement. Lance obviously couldn’t explain anything right now about who Keith was or how they’d met, but after a minute of intense scrutiny while Hunk checked the blood on them to make sure none of it was Lance’s, he seemed to put away his suspicion, at least for a little bit. They slid Keith off of Lance’s back and into the spare bed normally reserved for when Matt came to visit (Lance would have to remember to wash the sheets before he showed up next) and nosed the blankets over him to keep him nice and warm.

Except Keith’s body temperature was pretty much room temperature, so he really couldn’t get any use out of the blankets. Did vampires get cold? His wolf whined at the thought and considered clambering into bed with him before Hunk, apparently operating on the same wavelength, returned with an electric blanket. God bless Hunk. Between the two of them they got the thing tucked around Keith, plugged in, and turned on, at which point Keith hummed a little in his sleep and curled up tighter, and it was adorable, and oh no Hunk had that look on his face. That look that said _I know exactly what you’re thinking right now and you can’t fool me and we will be talking about this when we’re human_.

Fuck.

In the end, he really shouldn’t have been worried about Hunk’s reaction. Once they’d gotten human vocal cords back, and Lance had explained everything, Hunk had found the whole situation adorable and kept laughing about how Lance had managed to packbond with a vampire. The problems began, though, when the others came home. Allura was already snarling as she walked through the door, deeper than normal from the aftereffects of the transformation back, and Lance had to physically bar her from tearing Keith apart in his sleep. Pidge and Shiro seemed more curious than anything, and Lance was pretty sure he could convince them that Keith was a good vampire, but Allura….

“Come on, Allura. They...did something to him, and he was hurting and hungry and I couldn’t just leave him with a bunch of hunters.”

“You definitely could have, though.”

“I mean, it was just the two of us in a small room for hours and we started talking and I just, you know, we got to know each other. Not like _that_,” he added to the eyebrows Pidge was waggling in his direction.

"Oh dear Lord, you made friends with it,” Allura despaired.

"Are you saying you wouldn't have talked to him if you were in my position?"

"He’s a _vampire_, Lance," as if Lance hadn’t known that, “and he’s dangerous. His kind aren’t our friends.”

“Lance has a point though,” Shiro said, “that whole ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ thing? So what if Keith drained two people, they were hunters. Good riddance.”

“Hunters that apparently didn’t even know anything about werewolves.”

“Well that’s not Keith’s fault. And it’s not Lance’s either, it’s not like he could have prevented the transformation,” Shiro reasoned. “I say we let him stay here, then you can question him when he wakes up. Question him,” he reiterated, “not terrorize him.”

* * *

Keith’s waking was a slow, comfortable, leisurely one. The bed was soft, and the blankets were surprisingly warm, and he still felt pleasantly full from his meal. Everything seemed dark from behind his eyelids, so no need to worry about the sun hitting him anytime soon. Keith was just about to snuggle back down into the bed and fall back asleep when he noticed a strange scent. Not entirely unpleasant, but an unexpected one.

Werewolves, right. His memory after Lance had killed the hunters was pretty hazy, but he had vague recollections of movement and coarse fur under his cheek. Lance must have taken him home.

Except, if Lance had taken him home, that meant he was currently in some kind of werewolf den. Which meant he probably shouldn't just go back to sleep. He forced himself to sit up in the bed and open his eyes, and couldn't stop a surprised scream when he came face to face with several new werewolves. What had they been doing, just watching him sleep?!

"Hey Keith, it's fine!" Lance had popped up from behind the shortest one with a voice that was probably meant to be reassuring but came off slightly tense.

"I will decide whether this is fine." Keith had pegged the big, muscly one with the scar over the bridge of his nose as the alpha, but it turned out that it was the white-haired woman and she was Not Happy about Keith’s presence. Keith shifted down lower, draping more of the blanket over his shoulder and hoping the submissive gestures for vampires would translate over to werewolves. It didn’t seem to work. “I’d like to know what your intentions are.”

His intentions? Keith didn’t have any intentions. The last time he’d been awake, he was convinced he was going to starve to death, and now suddenly he wasn’t, so mostly his intentions were to revel in the fact that he wasn’t dead.

“Uh.”

“Speak up,” the alpha growled.

“I don’t, I don’t really have plans,” Keith tried, which was apparently the wrong answer. The alpha snarled again, but one of the others put a hand on her shoulder.

“Maybe we can start off a little less aggressively, huh? I’m Shiro,” he said to Keith. “Tall and Angry over here is Allura, then we have Hunk, and Pidge, and obviously you already met Lance. You’re at our house, which you probably figured out, and Allura is just a little overprotective of the pack.” 

“He’s a vampire,” the alpha, Allura, interjected.

“Yes, we’ve established that. What Allura is not-so-effectively trying to ask is how can we be sure you won’t do us harm?”

“I won’t. I couldn’t, even if I wanted to. Not that I want to!” he added quickly. “Lance saved my life, and you’re Lance’s pack, I have no desire to hurt any of you. You can just kick me out if you want and I’ll be out of your hair. Or, fur, I guess. Or both.” Allura looked plenty ready to agree to that plan, but the short one elbowed her out of the way.

“What do you mean, you can’t hurt us?” she asked. Keith hesitated, already cursing himself for letting that slip, but now Lance was shoving his way forward, too.

“Come on, show them!” Lance said. And Keith did not like showing off a huge, gaping weakness like this, especially not to the pack of werewolves he was currently at the mercy of, but Lance had gotten him out of that hellhole and given him access to a meal, so, ok. He could trust Lance. He tentatively opened his mouth to let them see the lack of fangs, and heard one of them gasp when they realized what was wrong. The big guy - Hank, maybe? - gave him a pitying “ohhhhhhh,” which choked off into a laugh as Keith reared back in shock when the smallest one literally shoved her hand into his mouth, then tried to scramble further back into the corner when Allura started growling at him. Keith wanted to yell about how it wasn’t his fault but who knew if the werewolf would try to prod at his teeth if he opened his mouth again?

“Pidge, maybe give a guy some warning?” Lance said with a laugh. She, Pidge apparently, huffed.

“Fine. Hello Mr. Vampire, may I please inspect your jaw?”

“Do not try anything,” Allura said before Keith could get a word in edgewise, and honestly, what did she expect Keith to do? Try to bite Pidge’s hand without his fangs while the entire pack was staring at him?

The three minutes or so it took Pidge to poke around at his mouth while Allura glared over her shoulder were maybe the most awkward of his life, made worse by trying not to laugh as Lance made faces from behind the alpha. Whatever the outcome, he couldn’t help but be relieved when Pidge stepped back.

“Yeah, I think Hunk and I could make some implants,” Pidge said after wiping her hand on Lance’s shirt.

“Implants?”

“Like fake fangs? My mom probably has some stuff lying around we could use for the castings,” she said in an aside, but Keith was too busy reeling with this new information. He’d just assumed he was going to have to start stealing blood from hospitals or something if he wanted to survive now, but this?

“You could do that?”

“Well yeah, after making an arm for Shiro that shifts between his human and wolf forms, a couple vampire fangs probably won’t be much of a problem,” Pidge said with a smirk as Shiro waved said arm in demonstration.

“I don’t...have any way to pay you back.”

Hunk dismissed it with a wave of his hand. “It's no biggie. The challenge of creating something like this is enough.”

“Besides, something this small shouldn’t be too expensive,” Pidge added.

“You can go back to your coven in the meantime,” Allura said. “I don’t want a vampire living in my house.”

“Allura, we’d need Keith here in order to test them out and make sure they fit right,” Pidge complained.

“Not my problem. You’re already doing him a huge favor. Isn’t that right, vampire?” Keith could only nod in agreement.

“We'll call you when the fangs are ready, what's your number?” Hunk asked.

“Uh, I don't actually own a phone…”

“Right. Ok sure, because that's normal in 2019,” Pidge said, cut off with an ‘oof’ as Shiro elbowed her in the side.

“Just come back the day before the next full moon," Hunk said. "Hopefully we'll have them done by then.” 

Lance walked him out, apologetic the whole time, but Keith assured him he didn’t take offense. Vampires and werewolves weren’t supposed to get along, and to Allura, Keith was a threat - she was just protecting her pack. 

And yeah, Keith didn’t exactly have a coven to go back to, but he got it. He could just stay somewhere close by, and he'd get hungry in the meantime but it wasn't as if that was a really new occurrence. The promise of a way to fix what was wrong combined with the blood he’d taken from the hunters would hopefully sustain him until then.

* * *

Keith probably would have ended up staying on the streets if it wasn't for a chance meeting about a week after the full moon. He'd found a reasonably safe place to camp out on the edge of the wolves' territory, in one of the not-so-nice parts of town where people tended not to look too closely at strangers. There was an abandoned old factory out there - the windows were unfortunately large, but the walls would shield him from the sunlight as long as he woke up every few hours to move. Not ideal, but doable.

He was already forcing himself to sleep lightly from the sun, so it was no surprise that he startled awake at the sound of the door opening. He'd assumed at first that it was humans, someone else coming to squat in the old factory, but the voice made his stomach drop.

"I know you're here, Keith."

Shiro.

Fuck.

Luckily Shiro didn't seem to be angry as Keith slinked out into the open - more confused than anything.

"You're really lucky that it was me that found you and not Allura," he said. "She's patrolling on the other side of town today."

"Sorry, I know she said...I'll leave tonight."

"I said you were lucky, not that I was going to tell her you were here," Shiro said with an easy grin. "Allura can be a little…unyielding when it comes to vampires. But you probably noticed that. Can I ask what you're doing here, though? An old dusty factory with giant windows doesn't sound like a great choice for a vampire."

"Well it was convenient, and abandoned, and I thought it would be far enough away that none of you would notice. Guess I was wrong."

"Wait you've been...have you been staying here since you left our place? Why?"

"I just told you," Keith muttered miserably. The cat (wolf?) was out of the bag now - Shiro would figure out that Keith was alone, and he'd tell Allura, and who knew what an angry alpha werewolf would do to a loner vampire with no fangs.

"Keith, if I ask you a question about your coven, will you answer it truthfully?"

"Depends on what the question is," he said, huddling further away from the sunlight inching its way across the floor.

"Did they give you grief for getting caught by hunters?"

The naive question startled a laugh out of Keith that probably didn't help his case. "They wouldn't care even if they had known. I don't have a coven anymore." Keith had been expecting more questions - what coven was it, why did they kick you out, what did you do - but all he got was a werewolf looking at him with pity and concern.

"Keith, that must be hard. I know what that’s like; I was alone for a couple years before I met up with Pidge's family. Especially without your fangs that can't be easy."

"It's not," Keith admitted. Shiro gave him a long, hard look, then nodded to himself.

"Come with me." Keith panicked and skidded a few feet backward - the sun was still bright overhead, what was Shiro planning? But Shiro just sent him a confused look for a few moments before slapping himself in the face. "God, I'm sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. I forgot you were a vampire for a second there,” he added sheepishly. “Let me call and see if anyone's around to take you home."

"Home?"

"The pack house," Shiro clarified. "I can't just let you live on the streets all alone. You'll stay with us, at least until Pidge and Hunk finish with your implants."

“Isn’t Allura going to be upset about that?”

“Definitely, but she’ll see reason. We don’t leave people out in the cold. Besides, Lance has been moping, loudly, ever since Allura kicked you out,” Shiro explained. Keith wasn’t really sure what to do with that; he couldn’t remember the last time someone had missed him, so he chose to ignore it. He’d deal with the implications from that later.

“I can’t actually really feel the cold.”

“Uh-huh. I’m pretty sure that's not true since you got so enamored with that electric blanket.”

“Just because I like the heat doesn't mean I feel the cold.”

“Sure, sure, of course," Shiro said absently as he dialed. "Hey, Hunk. Are you free to do me a favor? Great, can you get the SUV with the blackout windows and meet me at the warehouse district? Hunk, calm down, everything's fine. We're going to have a vampire boarder for a few weeks but it's still too bright for him to leave. Yeah, that probably wouldn't go amiss. Perfect, thanks Hunk. Alright, Hunk will be here in half an hour with the car and a big blanket for you to hide under. You want to take a nap while we wait? You look tired." 

Keith could only blink at him, struggling to reconcile Allura’s aggression and everything he'd been told about territorial werewolves with the outright kindness he was getting from Shiro. Luckily Shiro seemed to understand some of his concern, sitting down on the dusty floor to make himself smaller and less threatening. Which was still confusing, honestly, but at least it was less stressful.

"I just figured you probably haven't slept well with the threat of sunlight literally hanging over your head in this place, and it's daytime anyways. You don't need to sleep if you don't want to, but I figured I'd offer. I won't let the sun hit you." It was tempting; it meant letting his guard down to sleep in front of a werewolf, but he'd be doing that at the pack house anyway so he might as well start now, right? When Shiro slipped out of his jacket and offered it as a pillow, Keith's decision was made for him.

Keith didn't really sleep; trusting Lance, who he'd talked to for hours and who had intentionally used his transformation to help Keith, was one thing, but trusting Shiro, who was being kind for no discernible reason, was another. Still, he managed to doze through Shiro losing badly at Candy Crush, just beginning to slip down deeper when he distantly heard the door open again.

"Sorry it took a little longer than planned," Hunk whispered. "Lance wanted to come, too."

"What's the deal, Shiro? What is Keith doing out here?"

"Loner vampire," Shiro murmured back. "This is where he's been since Allura kicked him out."

"What the fuck?"

"I know. If I'd had any idea he was alone I would've stepped in." There was a pause, probably some kind of werewolf telepathy shit happening, but Keith was too drowsy to bother opening his eyes and finding out. "We can't change what happened," Shiro finally said, "but we can fix it. At the very least he needs a bed and someplace safe from the sun, both of which we can provide."

"Should we wake him up?" Hunk asked.

"Probably for the best. He's tense; we don't want him startling awake and panicking." There were more footsteps, much closer this time, and there was a brief flare of fear until Keith recognized the scent as Lance's.

"Hey there, Sleepy Bat," Lance cooed, gently shaking Keith's shoulder.

"'M not a bat," he mumbled. "Myth."

"Yeah, yeah, I know. You still need to wake up, though. Hunk and I are going to take you home and I promise you can sleep there and you can even have your blanket back, but you need to get up." Keith grumbled at that, contemplating just turning over and away from the hand still trying to nudge him awake. But Shiro probably wanted his jacket back, and Hunk and Lance probably had other things they needed to get done, and being delayed by Keith's refusal to wake up properly wasn't going to endear him to the wolves much. So he blindly threw out an arm, an invitation to pull him to his feet that both Lance and Hunk took, blearily opening his eyes to realize that Shiro had actually situated himself to be a physical barrier between Keith and the sun as he'd slept.

Huh.

Before he could think much more about it, Lance tugged a hoodie over his head and Hunk followed up by dumping a large, heavy throw over him and led him toward the doors. It was like a bizarre game of pin the tail on the donkey, only the donkey was the SUV Keith barely avoided running into after Lance screeched in his ear.

"We took the back seats out and laid down some blankets on the floor," Hunk explained, helping him into the vehicle, "so it should keep you out of the sunlight until we get home." Keith murmured his thanks, drowsiness returning in full force now that he was lying down again. The blankets were soft, and Hunk and Lance's voices were hushed as they debated whether to put on some music. They finally settled on some kind of calm piano thing that made him relax further into his blanket nest on the floor, the smell of gasoline and the sound of the engine fading as he fell all the way into sleep.

* * *

"So. Vampire," Allura began after the werewolves had eaten dinner. Keith wondered if she had legitimately forgotten his name. "Would you mind telling us why you don't have a coven?"

Yeah, actually, now that Allura asked, Keith did mind telling them that, but he supposed he didn't have much of a choice.

"Right. Um, I got kicked out of my coven, about two months ago."

"How could you possibly do something so horrible that other vampires thought it was bad?" Allura asked. "See, I told you this was a bad idea Lance, you shouldn't have brought it home-"

"I disagreed with them for kidnapping humans off the street and using them like cattle," Keith interrupted, and then instantly regretted it when he realized he'd talked back to the alpha. As quick as he could, he shifted his eyes down to the table and lean away from the wolves, but the expected rebuke never came. Instead there was just a breathy "what the fuck" almost simultaneously from Lance and Hunk.

"You..what?" Shiro asked.

“Explain,” Allura demanded.

"Ok, so do you guys know the Galra Coven?"

"We're familiar, but we haven't ever run into them personally," Shiro said. "Big group up in the north eastern part of the country right?"

"Yeah. I was in the coven, and a while back I realized that some of the others were picking humans off the streets. You know, homeless people, prostitutes, the kind of humans they didn't expect anyone to miss. And they just kept them in the main complex, like, like they were livestock we were supposed to use. And I know it was stupid because I'm only one vampire and what could I really do about it, but I couldn't just let them keep doing it, so I raised a complaint to the high ranking vampires about it. Only I didn't realize that the high ranking vampires were the ones that had started it, so they...weren't too happy about that."

"What did they do?" Hunk asked. Keith just raised an eyebrow and gestured at his face.

"How do you think I lost my fangs?"

“I thought the hunters had done that!” Lance shouted.

Keith scoffed at him. “You thought hunters who didn’t even know you were a werewolf would have been clever enough to remove my fangs and strong enough to do it before I was starving?”

“Hey, you didn’t know I was a werewolf either.”

“I was delirious with hunger.”

“We’re getting off-topic," Allura said, massaging her temples.

“Right, sorry. So, yeah, they pinned me down and ripped out my fangs, and then they branded my face so that all the other Galra would know I’d been thrown out of the coven.”

“Your ...your coven did that to you? I thought covens were basically vampire packs, you’re supposed to be family!” Pidge yelled.

“Maybe they started out like that, but the Galra just basically wanted to control as much territory as possible. Their coven was a lot more like an empire than a family.”

“What about your sire, could you go to them? Or were they with the Galra, too?” Shiro asked.

“I...don’t have a sire. Or I mean, obviously I had a sire, but I never met them. Whoever it was turned me and when I woke up they were gone.”

“You were turned against your will?” Shiro seemed surprised by it, but Keith had met plenty of other Galra vampires who had similar stories.

“Yeah, it happens sometimes. More often than vampires would like to admit.”

“What about,” Lance started, “I mean you said you were turned recently, could you go to your family? Do they know what happened to you?”

“Yeah that's...not really an option. I was an orphan, went through the foster system and then aged out when I hit 18."

“Well that settles it,” Shiro said, getting up from the table with a sense of finality, "you're staying with us until Pidge and Hunk can finish those new fangs of yours. Nope, sorry Allura, you've been outvoted."

* * *

Living with werewolves was….odd. At the Galra Coven, things had been incredibly strict. Don't speak unless spoken to, don't make eye contact with a higher ranking vampire, don't disobey an order, wait your turn to drink after all the higher ranks have gotten their fill. Vampires that didn't adhere to the rules would be punished and exiled, as Keith could attest to.

It wasn't exactly a pleasant existence.

But the wolves seemed to operate under completely different ideals. Sure, Allura was the alpha, and the others clearly deferred to her to make important decisions, but they had no qualms disobeying her or talking back in the absence of an emergency. And Allura didn't really seem to care, either - took it in stride when Shiro called her a "deranged poodle" to her face or when Pidge flipped her off for telling her to go to bed. Keith was the exception, of course, not allowed to go out without Allura's supervision and he wasn't anywhere near ready to try mouthing off at the alpha, but for all the supposed antagonism between wolves and vampires, Keith was finding it surprisingly easy to settle in.

The rest of the pack apparently slept in a giant pile in the large bedroom, so Keith had been allowed to stay in the guest room - they’d put up some blackout curtains to protect him from the sun and even let him keep the electric blanket he'd gotten so attached to. Keith had tried in vain to set his schedule up to match with most of the wolves, but suddenly becoming diurnal just wasn’t possible. He settled on waking up around 5 in the evening and found himself constantly being cajoled into game nights with the pack or play fights with Shiro and Lance, while Pidge egged them on and Hunk shouted at them to "be careful of the lamp, that's my favorite lamp!" Which of course caused Pidge to sputter out "I love lamp" and even Allura joined in the laughter for that one. Over the course of only a few days they'd all adapted to each other's schedules: Hunk would be the first one asleep, then Allura, Shiro, and Lance all in a fight over control for the bathroom. Keith had somehow taken over Allura's job of getting Pidge to sleep, normally dragging her toward their pack pile around 4am. Then he had the house to himself for a few relaxing hours before Hunk got up at 7 to make breakfast.

His previous experiences of living with other people - the foster families, the group homes, the Galra Coven - none of them had come with this feeling of companionship. It was scary how quickly he'd gotten used to everything - how quickly he'd gotten attached to everyone.

Even Allura had her merits; in the quiet moments between pack activities or toward the end of the night when the wolves started to get drowsy, she'd sit with Keith and they'd talk. At first it was the typical shovel discussion, you hurt my pack I'll rip your throat out, but it gradually turned toward other topics. They discovered a mutual love of old weaponry and Keith had nearly started drooling when Allura showed him her own armory in the basement of the house. He had definitely started drooling when Allura, a competitive gleam in her eye, asked if he wanted to _test any of them out_. Lance and Shiro found them about an hour later, both panting from the exertion of sparring with actual knives, and Shiro only shook his head in exasperation and told them it was time for dinner.

* * *

There was, of course, still the problem of Keith needing blood to live. Normally draining two people would mean he was set for a while, but he'd been coming off a large period of starvation, so it was only about two weeks before he started to get thirsty again, and Keith had absolutely no idea how to broach that subject to a group of werewolves. Luckily, though, Hunk's caretaking instincts seemed to extend to vampires, as well.

“You’re probably thirsty, aren’t you?” he said, apropos of nothing, while he was making dinner one night.

"A little bit,” Keith admitted, eyeing the blood pooling around the beef. "It's not too bad yet."

“Do you want some of this? Can vampires even drink animal blood?”

“I don’t know. The Galra claimed we couldn’t, but for all I know it was just lies to reinforce their need for the humans."

"Well, what's the worst that can happen?" Hunk shared a shrug with Keith as he ladled up some of the warmed blood into a mug.

Keith took a cautious sniff of it, and it smelled alright. Not quite as good as human blood, but like Hunk had said, it probably wouldn’t be too bad. Worst case scenario it just wouldn’t do anything, and then they’d need to come up with something else, right? So he took a small sip, almost choking on it as the taste hit him, and then threw the rest of the mug back in an attempt to get it down without it actually touching his taste buds because _holy fucking shit_.

“That good, huh?” Hunk asked with poorly-veiled concern.

“Oh my god, how had it smelled so much better than it tasted?” Keith coughed, hanging miserably off one of the chairs at the breakfast bar. Hunk turned away from the pot on the stove to look, and then visibly paled. 

“Are you ok?”

Keith hadn’t felt like this in years, but he still recognized the telltale nausea. "Oh fuck, Hunk, we fucked up," he said, scrambling to get to the sink; it was too far away, but Hunk slid the kitchen garbage can underneath his chin just in time. It didn’t last long, at least, Hunk hovering ineffectually nearby as Keith threw up blood, but by the end of it, Keith was spent.

“We made it worse, you look even more tired than you did before,” Hunk despaired, dragging him into his room and shoving him onto the bed. “You should sleep, I think.” He fluffed up the pillows and literally tucked Keith into bed as he said it; he must have told the rest of the pack, as well, because Keith managed to doze for a couple hours in relative silence. He was woken up by Hunk in his room again, with another mug that Keith couldn’t help but look at with suspicion.

“I know that werewolf blood isn’t supposed to be really tasty for you, but it’s what I’ve got, and I felt awful about goading you into drinking the beef blood, so here.”

“You really didn’t,” Keith tried to argue even has he took the cup, “I thought it was a good idea, too.”

“Well anyway, I know you’re still thirsty, so I hope this helps. And before you try to turn down the offer, it’s not as if I can actually stick it back in my veins.” Hunk was right; werewolf blood wasn’t exactly to his taste, a bit too gamey and earthy for him, but it was still human blood of a sort and he’d gladly accept it.

“And tell me next time,” Hunk said as he headed back into the kitchen. “We all know you need to drink blood, so don’t just suffer in silence, ok?”

* * *

The evening before the full moon, Keith was jolted unhappily out of sleep by Pidge and Hunk throwing themselves onto his bed.

“Give him a second, guys,” Lance said with a laugh from the doorway, “he’s always grumpy when he wakes up.”

“You’re grumpy when you wake up,” Keith managed to mumble in return, shoving his face further into the pillow.

“You’re never actually awake when I wake up, how would you know?” Lance countered, cut off with a grunt as someone shoved him.

“You’ll want to be awake for this, Keith,” Shiro said.

“They’re done!” Hunk shouted in his ear as Pidge shoved something in his face. It was too close to really see anything but there was only one thing that Pidge and Hunk would have been this excited about.

“You finished them?” he asked, scrambling upright to get a good look at them. Even this close up, the implants looked like normal fangs. If they worked right, no one would even be able to tell the difference. They moved into the living room once Keith was fully awake for the better light, and it was all he could do to stay still as Hunk worked to get them attached, connecting them with some cyanoacrylate and a couple discreet wires. He sat back and let Keith get used to them; after so long without, it was almost odd to have something back in the empty spaces along his jaw. 

"We should test them. Here," Lance said, shoving his arm underneath Keith's mouth. And oh, that was really tempting, but Allura was glaring daggers at him from across the room. "Oh, leave him alone, Pack Princess. There's no use Pidge and Hunk making him new fangs if he can't actually use them." When Allura grumbled something under her breath but didn’t actually look like she was going to get off the couch, Keith cautiously bit down onto Lance’s arm, trying to be as gentle as possible. They worked like a charm, a burst of werewolf blood flooding into his mouth before he disengaged, licking the excess blood off.

“Perfect,” Pidge said with a smile, and Keith almost started crying at the ease of it, running his tongue over the new additions. He could finally hunt properly again, no stealing from blood banks or “borrowing” blood from Hunk.

Of course, he’d forgotten about the caveat that came with the new fangs.

“Alright,” Allura said pointedly. “We had a deal. Time for the vampire to go.”

"Seriously, Allura?" Shiro hissed. "We talked about this."

"And I took your advice into consideration and determined this was best. For all of us."

Keith had never really understood the term "puppy dog eyes" until he saw the rest of the pack pleading with Allura to let him stay. It didn’t work, of course, but it was an impressive display nonetheless. Allura turned away primly, seemingly unaffected, tossing a “you can have ten minutes to say goodbye” over her shoulder as she went into the kitchen. 

“Shiro,” Hunk lamented. “Can’t you do something?”

“I tried,” he said, running a hand over his face. “I thought I’d gotten through to her, but I guess not. Well,” he lowered his voice and cast a furtive glance toward the kitchen and then pressing a very expensive-looking phone into Keith’s hands, “guess you can have this regardless. It’s hooked up to the pack’s account so you don’t need to worry about paying for it. Hunk does the accounting so Allura will never know the difference, and all our numbers are already loaded in.”

“Shiro, I can’t accept this.”

“Sure you can," Lance said. "We all want to know that you’re going to be ok, so keep in touch, yeah?"

This was hard, so much harder than Keith had expected leaving to be, especially with Hunk and Pidge hanging on to him as he tried to walk through the door and Lance crying at him and Shiro pulling him into a tight hug. But eventually, with a pointed cough from the kitchen, they admitted defeat.

“See if you can find the Marmora Coven,” Shiro suggested as Keith was leaving. “I’ve run into them a few times - they’re good people. Unfortunately they’re also kind of secretive and I’m not sure where they’re stationed right now, but you might be able to ask around.”

Keith wandered away from the pack, new phone securely in the pocket of Lance’s hoodie (Lance had been offended when Keith tried to give it back), and had no idea where he was going, other than “not in the direction of the Galra.” Hopefully Keith could just get lucky and bump into the Marmora, or maybe there were other vampire covens out there that were kinder and accepting of new members. He walked through the night, not in any particular hurry, and stopped just before sunrise at a small park. It was too dangerous to actually let his guard down and sleep out in the open like this, but he could probably risk a light doze under the shade of the large maple.

He was just getting comfortable when a car drove past the park carrying the faintest scent of something odd with it. It was probably nothing, and Keith was almost asleep when he realized what it was. Wolfsbane.

Shit.

He grabbed at his phone, nearly dropping it in his haste to call Shiro, but it just went to voicemail. The wolves were probably asleep after the full moon, and they’d be tired and defenseless and _shit_, he couldn’t just let it happen. He switched to texting the wolves, opening up a group text for Shiro, Pidge, Hunk, and Lance to tell them what was happening before he started running back toward the pack house. The scent of wolfsbane just kept getting stronger the closer he got, and by the time he made it back to the house about an hour later, having run as fast as his vampiric speed would let him, there was an unfamiliar car parked in front and the door was off its hinges.

He burst into the front room to find four people, clearly hunters, had the werewolves separated - Pidge and Lance backed into the corner by the couch, and Hunk, Shiro, and Allura barricaded into the kitchen. The hunter closest to Pidge and Lance was brandishing a knife that had clearly been dipped into more wolfsbane (and all the hunters are covered in wolfsbane too, at this concentration the smell was enough even to give Keith pause, so he couldn’t imagine what it was doing to the wolves), and Keith reacted without thinking, slamming himself into the closest hunter. One sharp twist to the neck and he was down and Keith was on to the next, a woman whose gun had switched from pointing at the wolves to pointing at Keith. He vaguely heard the shot, but Keith, his speed augmented by adrenaline and rage, was on his game and anticipated it. He ducked down, avoided a second shot from the gun, and then bit her hand off and ripped into her neck. Behind him, he could sense the other hunters approaching, but he was already grabbing the discarded gun off the floor and punching two of their own bullets into their foreheads.

It couldn’t have been longer than about thirty seconds before there were four hunters, dead on the floor, and the taste of human blood and wolfsbane in Keith’s mouth. Everything was quiet for a few moments, save for the sound of blood dripping from one of the hunter’s wounds, before Allura spoke.

"I believe I told you to get out of our territory,” she said wryly.

“Yeah, well. Lance saved me from those hunters and Pidge and Hunk saved my life long-term by making me new fangs so really I was just...repaying you all.”

On some nonverbal cue, the pack minus Allura clustered around Keith, all of them sort of rubbing against him and nuzzling him not unlike cats (not that he’d ever tell them that) and he realized they were probably trying to replace the wolfsbane scent with pack scent. When they’d apparently decided he smelled enough like wolf to pass muster, they didn’t leave, either - Hunk a solid presence at his back, Shiro and Lance on either side and Pidge still with her face burrowed into Keith’s borrowed hoodie. Only Allura stayed on the other side of the room, several dead hunters in between them, and just stared. Keith didn't really understand what was happening, but there was probably some kind of unspoken werewolf dialogue passing between them all. The rest of the pack remained in their places around him, a big warm group hug that Keith was perfectly content to accept.

"You know it makes sense from a tactical point of view, right?" Shiro was the first to break the silence. "Keith got taken down by hunters because he was alone and without his fangs. We just got attacked by hunters with wolfsbane on the day we're most vulnerable. If Keith stayed with us, we could cover each other’s weaknesses." Allura growled in response and Keith tried to shift lower, make himself less of a threat, but the other werewolves held their ground.

"He's important to me, Allura," Lance said.

"And we don't leave people behind." Hunk added.

"He's not a wolf."

"So? Neither is my mom."

"That's different."

"Yeah you're right, mom definitely couldn’t have ripped off a hunter’s hand with her teeth. No offense to my mom," Pidge added.

Allura took a deep breath, and Keith was braced for an epic shouting match or for her to start cussing him out, but then, “Fine. Fine. Ok. The vampire can stay.”

“You….seriously?” Keith said, expecting some kind of ‘gotcha’ to follow.

“Shiro makes a good point, and I suspect you all would mutiny if I said no.”

“We would,” Pidge agreed with absolutely no remorse in her voice.

"In that case," Allura said, brushing something off her dress and trying to straighten her hair, "your first job as pack member is to help us clean up the bodies on the floor." Which was fair, considering he was the only one who could touch their wolfsbane-coated skin without problems, and it also meant he could help himself to a snack before the hunters' blood got too cold so all-in-all Keith wasn't going to complain. Shiro grimly brought him a few very large, very sturdy trash bags and, once they were all secure, helped Keith drag them out the backdoor while Hunk led the others in an attempt to clean the stains out of the rugs before they set. Keith suspected it was a lost cause, given how strongly he could still smell the blood on the floor.

Things weren't perfect, and Keith was sure the wolves must have still been on edge from someone coming into their house and trying to kill them, but at least they were an improvement from before. For now it was enough, and when Shiro suggested putting off the rest of the...disposal until night time, everyone quickly agreed.

"I say it's bedtime," Lance mumbled at Keith's side. "You're tired because you're nocturnal, and we're tired because we're coming off of the full moon and also we just got attacked by hunters and that's stressful." Keith couldn’t help but agree; the idea of settling into the cozy bed he'd started thinking of his sounded really appealing, but Lance had already grabbed his arm and dragged him down the hall in the wrong direction.

"You're pack now, and that means you sleep in the pack pile. No arguments."

"But Allura-”

"Is a grownup who officially let you into the pack and also she secretly likes you and we all know it."

"She what." This was news to Keith.

"Oh yeah," Shiro said, "if she didn't like you she would have torn you to shreds the first day you were here."

"And also, letting you into her special armory? Like, Keith, _we_ haven't even been allowed to do that. Allura was swayed by your vampiric charms the moment she saw you."

“She _what_.”

“Yep. She kept telling you that you couldn’t stay out of some stupid idea about vampire and werewolf politics, even though we all wanted you to stay, and she wanted you to stay, and you wanted you to stay. Which was stupid.”

“I heard that,” Allura muttered as she walked past and shoved Lance in the shoulder.

“You..did want to stay, right?” Lance asked, suddenly nervous, and Keith rolled his eyes at him.

“Lance, why wouldn’t I want to stay with the first group of people who actually seemed to care about me?”

“That’s reassuring, and also sad, and we need to put you in the pack pile stat,” Hunk said from behind him, picking Keith up and slinging him over his shoulder. Keith had no idea how his life (afterlife?) had become this, as Hunk tossed him into the pile of mattresses, blankets, and pillows, but he found himself sort of glad those hunters had picked him up if it had led to this. There was a chorus of "good mornings" as the rest of the wolves settled in, automatically making room for him.

And, as Keith discovered, being smothered in a pile of werewolves was even better than the electric blanket.


End file.
